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Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Bill Still: Competing Currencies, Gold, and Tyranny



He is well known in economics academia that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz written by L. Frank Baum in 1900 is loaded with powerful symbols of monetary reform which were the core of the Populist movement and the 1896 and 1900 president bid of Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

The yellow brick road (gold standard), the emerald city of Oz (greenback money), even Dorothy's silver slippers (changed to ruby slippers for the movie version) were the symbol of Baum's and Bryan's belief that adding silver coinage to gold would provide much needed money to a depression-strapped, 1890s America.
2013 is the centennial of two developments that dramatically changed the United States -- and the world -- for the worse: The creation of the Federal Reserve System, and the imposition of the Income Tax through the 16th Amendment.

For more than a century, Americans had fought against the creation of a central bank; that fight was lost when the Federal Reserve was created.

How did the Federal Reserve come about? Who were its architects -- and what was their design? What has been the impact of the Federal Reserve on our economy? Should it be abolished -- and, if so, how can this be done?

We will discuss these questions with Bill Still, historian, author, and documentary filmmaker whose most recent project is the new film "Jekyll Island," an expose describing the secret origins of the Federal Reserve System.
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